When Nanasaheb Peshwa Dies on January 14 1761...

Today December 8 2013 is 293rd Birth Anniversary of  Nanasaheb Peshwa aka Balaji Baji Rao (नानासाहेब पेशवे / बाळाजी बाजीराव)

John Darwin:  

"Why do the products of Westernized culture (in science, medicine, literature and the arts) still command for the most part the highest prestige?"
 
Prof. Dr. John Darwin is a formidable name among historians. He is a faculty of history at University of Oxford.

Among others, he has written impressive 'The Empire Project: the Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830-1970' (Cambridge, 2009).

 I have already quoted Prof. Darwin on this blog earlier here. 

For Caravan, July 2013, Srinath Raghavan has reviewed historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam's book. There, Dr. Darwin has been praised as one of the "best historians" of the younger generation, in the league of the likes of  the late Eric Hobsbawm of older generation.

historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam

historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam

SRINATH RAGHAVAN

SRINATH RAGHAVAN

In the earlier post, I hailed his two books as 'masterly'. One of the two is 'The Empire Project' and the other is 'After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire', 2007.

I was thumbing through the latter and,  as is the habit, went to the pages where he writes on Marathas.

"The Maratha confederacy has long been portrayed as a predatory horde that reduced northern India to anarchy. But behind its rise can be seen something more interesting than an alliance of freebooters. The Marathas’ territorial conquests were marked not by scorched earth but by their elaborate revenue system, whose voluminous records are preserved at Poona (modern Pune). Maratha leaders aimed not at general devastation but at the gradual absorption of the Mughal domain into the sphere of their svarajya or ‘sovereignty’. Their object was not so much the absolute overthrow of Mughal power as its enforced devolution: hence the eagerness with which they sought to cloak their rule with the authority of Mughal grants and decrees. The Maratha enterprise, suggests a modern study, is best seen as the struggle of an emerging Hindu gentry, under their sardars or chiefs, to share Mughal sovereignty and revenues in ways that reflected the rising importance of new landholding groups...

...South Asia in the first half of the eighteenth century should not be seen as a region that was drifting from stagnation to anarchy. In the northern interior the triangular conflict between Marathas, Mughals and the transmontane invaders was also a struggle between ‘gentry’ groups, who were striving to build a stable and sedentary order of towns, markets and settled agriculture, and ‘warrior’ groups who were part of the old tradition of nomadic pastoralism on the upland plains connecting northern India and Central Asia."

Although little sobering is this: 'the Maratha confederacy has long been portrayed as a predatory horde that reduced northern India to anarchy'. 

Now, comes a howler from the professor.

"In a further battle at Panipat, in 1761, the Afghans crushed the Maratha army and killed the peshwa, chief minister of the confederacy."

We know that the then peshwa Nanasaheb Peshwa  on that day  was not even on the battlefield and was at least a 1000 km away in Maharashtra, and died a natural death, no doubt accelerated by the defeat,  five months later! On that day in the battlefield,  peshwa's cousin and son were killed.

I felt sad reading this blunder in Dr. Darwin's book. 

Nanasaheb Peshwa- earlier on this blog, I have been critical of him here and praised him here-  was one of the most important personalities of 18th century, not just in the Indian context but that of the South Asia, West Asia and colonizing nations of Europe. One may argue that he was at least as important, if not more, as George II of Great Britain, British monarch from 1727-1760.


When you look up 1761 in Wikipedia, it lists only 16 events for the year. The first one is the third battle of Panipat.  When you look up 1947  in Wikipedia, it lists about 113 events for the year. One of them is independence of India. 

T S Shejwalkar (त्र्यं शं शेजवलकर) narrates  how “wise-man” and a key adviser to the peshwa, Sakharam-Bapu Bokil (सखाराम बापू  बोकील),  had started making plans,  based on Maratha empire’s existing sway over large parts of South Asia, to reach Iran.   

I don't think, since his death,  any other native Marathi speaking personality has influenced 'world affairs' more. (No wonder 18th century Marathas get decent coverage in Darwin's book on global history.) All great  Marathi speaking personalities of 19th, 20th and 21st century India have at best influenced South Asian political/ social affairs.

Nanasaheb remains largely unsung in today's Maharashtra including Pune. I wonder why. 

Is it because he was a Brahmin? Wasn't he a product of his time like most men and women?  

Personally speaking, I have started hating Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) since reading "1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow", 2004 by Adam Zamoyski but Mr. Bonaparte is recently rated by some to be the second greatest person in the history of mankind, next only to Jesus. 

Historical personalities are not fairly judged by the yardstick of political correctness of the present.

 

Artist: George Price, The New Yorker, November 1 1941

Teach Machiavelli in India's Secondary Schools...नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण

Five hundred years ago, in December 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli had completed writing 'The Prince'.

"नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण " 

(Our conditions go cyclically up and down like the spokes of a wheel)

How warmly they greet each other, don't they?...Now read this:

Dexter Filkins, review of  'The Blood Telegram / Nixon, Kissinger, and Forgotten Genocide' by Gary J. Brass, The New York Times, September 27 2013:

"The voices of Kissinger and Nixon are the book’s most shocking aspects. Bass has unearthed a series of conversations, most of them from the White House’s secret tapes, that reveal Nixon and Kissinger as breathtakingly vulgar and hateful, especially in their attitudes toward the Indians, whom they regarded as repulsive, shifty and, anyway, pro-Soviet — and especially in their opinion of Indira Gandhi. “The old bitch,” Nixon called her. “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country but they do,” he said."

  
दुर्गा भागवत: 

"...मॅकिएवेलीत (माक्याव्हेल्ली) इतिहासाचे पूर्ण भान आहे. तसे अर्थशास्त्रात नाही..."

Harvey Mansfield:

"...'The Prince', together with its companion, 'the Discourses on Livy', neither published until after his death, announces an enterprise affecting all human beings today: the creation of the modern world."


Michael Ignatieff, The Atlantic, November 20 2013:

" The shocking lesson of The Prince isn’t that politics demands dirty hands, but that politicians shouldn’t care."

I still remember a lot of my fourth class history text book. 

In a chapter on King Harsha Vardhana (c 590-647), the king was much praised for his charity- there even was a picture on the subject there- and bravery. Other than his crushing defeat against Pulakeshi II, it was all roses.

And then I read this in John Keay's 'India: A History', 2000/2010:

"...Apparently Rajya-Vardhana, the brother, was so overcome with grief over their father’s death that he declined the throne and opted to retire to a hermitage. Improbably he too, therefore, insisted that Harsha succeed their father. Yet from other sources, including Hsuan Tsang, it is known that in fact it was Rajya-Vardhana who succeeded. Bana, in short, protests too much. Perhaps he simply wanted to bolster Harsha’s legitimacy by suggesting that he was the direct heir. Or perhaps he had a less creditable motive. As a recent biographer delicately puts it, ‘it is hard to escape the conclusion that the unusual twists in the story … were rendered inevitable because of some episode uncomplimentary to the author’s hero.’ More specifically it may be that Bana was trying to lull suspicions, still current at the time he was writing, that Harsha had had a motive, if not a hand, in Rajya-Vardhana’s imminent removal..."

 So it's not just Mahabharata but even pre-Islamic history of India too has some intriguing episodes!
  
Many Indians think Machiavelli's writings are like that of Chanakya/ Kautilya. That is not correct.

Durga Bhagwat (दुर्गा भागवत) has explained the difference between the two quite succinctly in her introduction to "Kautiliya Arthashastra",  Varada Prakashan (वरदा प्रकाशन), 1981 originally translated from Sanskrit into Marathi by B R  Hivargaokar ('कौटिलीय अर्थशास्त्र, अनुवाद: ब रा हिवरगावकर).

  Ms. Bhagwat says there is a sense of history in Machiavelli's writings, as also in Aristotle's, while there is none in Kautilya's.  And I feel this lack of historical sense is a major drawback of  Kautiliya Arthashastra.

Introducing Isaiah Berlin's 'The Proper Study of Mankind / An Anthology of Essays" , 1997,  Roger Hausheer says: 

"...Virtually all Berlin's work in the history of ideas revolves around what he sees as the greatest revolution in our basic outlook since the Renaissance: the rebellion against monism. The writer whose work, for Berlin, contains the earliest premonitions of this shift is Machiavelli. He, Berlin tells us, was probably the first to juxtapose starkly two mutually exclusive systems of morality: Christian ethics, which aim at the perfection of the individual life; and those of Republican Rome, which aim at the power and the glory of the body politic. No criteria exist for choosing between these two equally valid systems. It is this, and not Machiavelli's 'Machiavel­lianism', that has exercised us ever since. It marks the first irreparable fracture in the belief in a single universal structure of values..."

  I feel this 'fracture in the belief in a single universal structure of values' , the absence of  Machiavelli from Indian thought process leaves most Indians somewhat bemused talking about politics. They don't know how to interpret almost complete lack of morals and ethics in contemporary politics, business, sports etc.

It's no coincidence that the best commentary on Indian politics, by some distance, is a Hindi novel 'Raag Darbari', 1968  by the late Mr. Sri Lal Sukla, For Indians, only high class satire and irony of Sukla could capture what Machiavelli calls 'the possible or realistic' in post-1947 India. 

It's for the same reason that cartoonists R K Laxman and the late Abu Abraham were the best political commentators for their respective national newspapers as long as they were active or alive. 

John Gray says, "In the view of most liberal thinkers today, basic liberties and equalities should be embedded in law, interpreted by judges and enforced as a matter of principle. A world in which little or nothing of importance is left to the contingencies of politics is the implicit ideal of the age...".

Most Indian liberal media and their 'guests' too think the same.

 But the trouble is "that politics can’t be swept to one side in this way. The law these liberals venerate isn’t a free-standing institution towering majestically above the chaos of human conflict. Instead – and this is where the Florentine diplomat and historian Niccolò Machiavelli comes in – modern law is an artefact of state power."

I don't know if Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) has been translated into Marathi. And even if he has been, I don't see any high-profile writer or speaker or TV anchor referring to him.

Francis Fukuyama, the author of 'The End of History and the Last Man', says about Machiavelli :

 "The Florentine was the first philosopher decisively to break with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition that saw the end of politics as promotion of a good or flourishing life. Not wanting to base his regime on “imagined republics”, Machiavelli deliberately lowered the horizon of politics to the pursuit of what was politically realistic. He was one of the first to see that domestic politics would be driven by the ruthless demands of foreign policy. We cannot rescue a “moral” Machiavelli by pointing to his references to the “common good”. That good was not based on a substantive view of a good life; it was simply instrumental to the ability to dominate others. This banishment of the good in favour of the possible or realistic is what in fact links Machiavelli to modern liberalism, and hence to us."

 Once we understand this- "...'common good' was not based on a substantive view of a good life; it was simply instrumental to the ability to dominate others" or "in politics, power was the effective principle", we can understand the politics around us much better.  Every action of every person in power- lawmakers, opposition, civil servants, cops, industrialists, media barons, judiciary etc-  seems explained. 
 
If you read "Nana Phadanvis Yanche Charitra / Aatmacharitrasaha" by V V Khare, first published in July 1892  ('नाना फडनवीस यांचे चरित्र/ आत्मचरित्रासह , लेखक: वा वा खरे), it's not difficult to comprehend elements of 21st century politics of Maharashtra. There is hardly anything new now.

(I have often wondered if Nana knew about  Machiavelli.)

Three and half wise men of 18th Century Maharashtra: Sakhya, Deva, Vitthala and Nana (सख्या , देवा , विट्ठला ,आणि नाना)
 
photo courtesy: Facebook page of Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal, Pune and Mr. Sandesh Panvelkar

If Indian media understand all this and still devote so much of time to "the minutiae of party politics", surely they see all this as pure entertainment and their claim, if any,  to being reformist is pretentious.

On the other hand, if they don't understand this, it is quite naive.

But can we avoid this "dirty" politics? Is there alternative to it?  Can we clean it? 

John Gray again: "The true lesson of Machiavelli is that the alternative to politics is not law but unending war." And hence we have to keep "playing" it. I don't think we can "clean" it either. 

We in India know impermanence (अनित्य) of it all... नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण...We don't have to go to Machiavelli to learn that. But if we do, as John Gray explains again, "Machiavelli believed that history follows a cyclical pattern in which old civilisations decay and die, while new ones are born in chaos and violence..."

So there is always hope...of the next cycle, whenever that begins.

Artist: Santi di Tito,  Location: Palazzo Vecchio

courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Plucking Tea...चढे चहाचे रोप, उपटतां स्तन हाले?

Today December 1 2013 is 104th Birth Anniversary of B S Mardhekar (बा सी मर्ढेकर)
""५५.

बोंड कपाशीचे फुटे,                                                  
उले वेचतांना ऊर;                                                     
आज होईल का गोड                                                 
माझ्या हाताची भाकर!                                          

भरे भुइमूग-दाणा,
उपटतां स्तन हाले;
 आज येतील का मोड
माझ्या वालांना चांगले!

वांगी झाली काळी-निळी,
काटा बोचे काढताना;
आज होतील का खुशी
माणसं गं जेवताना!"

(मर्ढेकरांची कविता, पृष्ठ  64, 1959/ 1977, मौज  प्रकाशन)

As oft-mentioned earlier, I lived on gorgeous tea estates of Assam continuously for a year and then, on and off, for another.

I remember our first winter there. One evening I excitedly asked my wife why I was smelling summer flowers of Maharashtra at this time of the year in Assam. She couldn't guess. I was told later that tea plant smelled like them occasionally.

I have also stayed in, equally gorgeous, Nilgiri tea estates in the South for a while.


But to my eternal regret, I never plucked any tea.

courtesy: http://tea-plucking.blogspot.in/

 I now feel bad after reading the following by Giji K. Raman in The Hindu, September 1 2013:

"...In the past centuries, they (British) came as planters, denuding hills to plant tea. Now they come as pickers of tea, not as labourers but as tourists. So do not be astonished if you see foreigners picking tea on estates in Munnar. It is a slow change happening in the tourism sector here.

On an estate at Thalayar, tourists who come to savour the beauty of the landscape are given a chance to pick tea. That most of the tourists who grab this opportunity are from the U.K. is not lost on the local populace. It was the East India Company which started planting tea in the mountains in Idukki.

British-made historical monuments, such as hanging bridges, bungalows, remains of ropeways and a railway system in Munnar, all related to the plantation sector, remain in the district. On the Thalayar estate, tourists can pick tea leaves in the morning and visit the factory in the evening. Again, an official says, it is the British who prefer the package..."

Mardhekar's poem above says while pulling groundnuts from the ground, breasts of the lady shake (भरे भुइमूग-दाणा, उपटतां स्तन हाले;)

I wonder what happens while plucking tea.

• 
  
  
  
  A British tourist plucks tea leaves at the Thalayar estate in Munnar.
  
  Photo: Giji K. Raman for The Hindu
   

Everything Was Seventeen Years Ago...राजकारण आणि वर्तमानपत्रे या दोन्ही संस्थांचे तसे बरे चालले

This is continuation of my earlier post dated November 27 2013.  

Walter Bagehot:

“The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”

A G Noorani, Frontline, July 2008:

“…Nepotism was rife. None other than Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to the Prime Minister of Central Provinces N.B. Khare on August 21, 1939, recommending the case of Ratanchand Hirachand of Indian Hume Pipe Co. for a contract. Sarojini Naidu wrote to Khare recommending Walter Dutt for a High Court judgeship. It was at this time that many bad precedents were set which affect us to the present day…”

Joseph Lelyveld, 'Great Soul / Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India', 2011: 

"India has now been free and independent for about four months...No single catastrophe served as catalyst for his (Mahatma Gandhi's) decision to start his seventeenth and final fast on January 13. In the days running up to the fast, he’d been forcefully struck by several indications that matters were on a downward slide. First he received a detailed account of rampant corruption at all levels of the newly empowered Congress movement in the Andhra region of southeastern India..."

Kuldip Nayar on what happened during the Emergency (1975-77):

"...Institutions got such a thrashing that it has not been possible to restore them to their original form even after three decades. Politicians of all parties and their cohorts, the bureaucrats, have found the battered institutions convenient and cooperative...The system has not recovered since..." 

(The Asian Age, June 25 2007)

Peter Parker, The Spectator, March 15 2014, a review of 'Capital: A Portrait of 21st-century Delhi' by Rana Dasgupta:

"...Capital is constructed around a series of mesmerising interviews, largely with members of Delhi’s ‘entrepreneurial’ class. Their identities mostly disguised, they speak with astounding and in some cases incriminating frankness about how they have achieved wealth, power and status through bribery, political corruption, land-grabs, money laundering and beating up anyone who gets in their way. What Dasgupta calls ‘the flourishing bourgeoisie’ tends to flourish at the expense of the poor, hundreds of thousands of whose homes have been torn down to make way for glossy new apartment complexes and shopping malls. Like most Indian cities, Delhi has been subject to large influxes of refugees during its history, but according to Dasgupta the ‘enormous transfer of wealth and resources from the city’s poorest to its richest citizens’ that has taken place since 2000 has ‘turned many of the former into refugees in their own city’.

How did this transfer happen? The final entry under ‘Nehru, Jawaharal’ in the index of Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi (2007) reads bleakly: ‘Work undone by daughter Indira.’ Dasgupta concurs, noting that it was during Mrs Gandhi’s long premiership that widespread collusion between thrusting businessmen and corrupt politicians became more or less accepted. He further suggests that the communal violence which followed Mrs Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, during which politicians and police not merely stood by but actually encouraged and facilitated the massacre of thousands of Sikhs, ‘sent a definitive message that law was a degenerate part of Indian social life and one’s only moral duty was to oneself’..."

Mrs. Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India from 1966- 1977 and 1980-1984.  Mr.  Govind Talwalkar joined journalism in 1950 and was the chief editor of Maharashtra Times from 1968 to 1996. 

Loksatta (लोकसत्ता ) has printed an abridged version of Mr. Talwalkar's speech here and written a leader on it here.

After reading the speech, I have nothing much to add to what I have already said.

There is a lot of nostalgia there and I have no problem with that. Nostalgia works like a tonic for most Marathi people of certain age.  

Artist: Charles Saxon, The New Yorker, 9 September 1961

Also there is a lament about the erosion of institutions in India- and who can deny that?-  but then we must remember what Friedrich Nietzsche says: "Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions."

As the quotes at the top of this post illustrate, there is more to it than Nietzschean 'nihilism'.

As time went by, I am not sure how many of modern India's founders, M/s. J. L. Nehru and Yashvantrao Chavan (यशवंतराव चव्हाण) included,  remained as committed to the institutions as we thought they were in 1947. 

Let me now turn to Loksatta leader on the speech.

It praises the late Y B Chavan in the following words:

"...महाराष्ट्रात संस्थात्मक जीवनाची मुहूर्तमेढ रोवली ती यशवंतरावांनी. राज्याची निर्मिती झाल्यानंतर अवघ्या काही महिन्यांत त्यांनी स्थापन केलेले औद्योगिक विकास महामंडळ असो वा साहित्य संस्कृती मंडळ वा मराठीतून विश्वकोशनिर्मिती असो..."

It says Mr. Chavan laid the foundation of Maharashtra's institutional life and illustrates the point with the names of three institutions he started: MIDC, Sahitya Sanskruti Mandal and Marathi Vishvakosh.

I have never been sure about the quality of work these institutions have done either in the past or the work they do today.  

"...  ही विवेकी अलिप्तता ही तळवलकरकालीन पत्रकारितेचा कणा होती. परंतु आज परिस्थिती अत्यंत उलट झाली असून देशातील विवेकशून्यांत माध्यमांचा क्रमांक बराच वरती लागावा. ज्यांनी तटस्थ राहावयाचे तेच आता राजकीय पक्ष वा नेत्यांच्या समोर हात बांधून उभे राहण्यात वा त्या पक्षांची वकिली करण्यात धन्यता मानू लागले आहेत. सत्तासान्निध्यामुळे मिळणारी सत्तेची ऊब ही आपलीच निर्मिती असल्याचे या माध्यमवीरांना वाटू लागले असून राज्यसभेची उमेदवारी आदी मिळवणे हेच त्यांचे उद्दिष्ट बनले आहे. तळवलकरांच्या काळात अशा व्यक्तिगत आशाअपेक्षा ठेवणारे पत्रकार नव्हते तसेच त्यांना उत्तेजन देणारे राजकारणीदेखील नव्हते. त्यामुळे राजकारण आणि वर्तमानपत्रे या दोन्ही संस्थांचे तसे बरे चालले." 

The passage above,  in short,  praises the profession of journalism, when Mr. Talwalkar was active in it, using words like 'discreet detachment' (विवेकी अलिप्तता). 

I am not sure if most journalists, then,  really had the kind of quality the passage implies.  (Thanks to my college-teacher father's familiarity with the media industry, I know how compromised many of them were but I can't name them.)

One needs to only recall the behaviour of 'respected newspapers' and their editors during  'The Emergency (India)'. In Mr. L K Advani's words: They were asked to bend but they crawled.

Loksatta passage also claims that the objective of journalists has now become getting a seat in  the Rajya Sabha by getting close to the powers that be. (I wonder why it doesn't include another objective: getting a Padma Shri award.)

I once again am not sure if the journalists during Mr. Talwalkar's time did not seek such goodies.

Loksatta claims the institutions of politics and journalism both worked alright 'then'.  (राजकारण आणि वर्तमानपत्रे या दोन्ही संस्थांचे तसे बरे चालले)

P S Appu, Economic and Political weekly, December 10 2011:

"... Though Indira Gandhi started as a weak prime minister, in a short period of three years she trumped the Syndicate and emerged as the supreme leader. Then she proceeded to snuff out inner-party democracy in the Congress, do away with periodic elections to party forums, identify and destroy regional leaders with popular support, undermine the great institutions of our federal-democratic polity and concentrate all power in her hands...

...All that changed under Indira Gandhi’s rule. Chief ministers like V P Naik and H N Bahuguna, who had solid political bases in their states, were eased out at some time or the other and lightweights loyal to the prime minister were inducted as chief ministers. They were obliged to keep in good humour all the supporting cliques and sycophants who had access to the supreme leader. All those developments adversely affected the quality of the administration and opened the floodgates of corruption..."

The wreck of India's institutions started very much on Mr. Talwalkar's watch. I wonder what he and Loksatta are nostalgic about ! Mrs. Indira Gandhi's charisma ?  Reminds me of Mark Twain.

"I used to remember my brother Henry walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old. It was remarkable in me to remember a thing like that and it was still more remarkable that I should cling to the delusion for thirty years that I did remember it -- for of course it never happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age. . . . For many years I remembered helping my grandfather drinking his whiskey when I was six weeks old but I do not tell about that any more now; I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened." 

 

At 88 Life Does Look Nebulous and Fuzzy...सध्याचे जीवन हे कमालीचे धूसर आणि अस्पष्ट झाले असून

Will Self, The Guardian, June 21 2013:

"...An unavoidable sequel of the posterity delusion is the death of the writerly self, which depends too much on incoherence and inconsistency to remain pompous for long. And of course, the vast majority of today's mummified immortals are tomorrow's Ozymandiases..."

Maureen Mullakey, 'The Weekly Standard',  December 17 2012:

"Five months before he died, Paul Cézanne attended the unveiling of a bust of Émile Zola, his old soulmate, at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix. Numa Coste, friend to both, addressed the gathering. He reminded the attendees of Zola’s autumnal insistence that “one thinks one has revolutionized the world, and then one finds out, at the end of the road, that one has not revolutionized anything at all.” The elderly painter cried at the words."

Jacob Mikanowski, The Point, 2013:

"...They’re not alone. There’s a whole fraternity of artists like that—writers convinced of their greatness and obsessed with their status. They seem genuinely important in their own time, but the farther away from them you get, the more special pleading they seem to require. The proof is never on the page. It takes work to see why they mattered, why they provoked so much controversy, why they were read or performed at all. Call them the footnote club, or the asterisk brigade. Or think of them as the white dwarves of literature; those cold, distant stars that seem bright at first but then dim by degrees until they seem always on the edge of being swallowed by the night..."

Mr. Govind Talwalkar (गोविंद तळवलकर), the then editor of Marathi newspaper Maharashtra Times (महाराष्ट्र टाइम्स) was,  as mentioned earlier on this blog,  like a Sumo wrestler on middle-class Maharashtra's (not certainly more in the size than 10%  of population of the state)  cultural mat in 1970's.  I too was his fan for a while. I still admire his ability to read a large number of books.  

Later in life,  however,  I always felt he had a limited intellectual capacity but his influence was disproportionately larger than that.

Many people, I felt,  then,  just got out of his way instead of challenging him or, better, made friends with him. Apparently, his job was the second most important job in Maharashtra, next only to the Chief Minister of the state.

Loksatta (लोकसत्ता ) dated November 26 2013 has a report on the speech he made in Mumbai (मुंबई) the previous day by video conference from US.

He is now 88 years old. Therefore when he says  "सध्याचे जीवन हे कमालीचे धूसर आणि अस्पष्ट झाले असून..." (today's life has become extremely nebulous and fuzzy), I agree with him completely. 

Despite all the advances in medical technology, particularly ophthalmology, one probably doesn't have a great eyesight at that age. I don't know about the rest of the world, but the life outside your window does become nebulous and fuzzy.

Then the report says: "सध्याच्या काळात आपले विचार इतरांनी वाचल्याशिवाय जगाला तरणोपायच नाही, असेच प्रत्येकाला वाटत असते, असे सांगत तळवलकर यांनी 'फेसबुक', 'इंटरनेट'ची आपल्या खास शैलीत खिल्ली उडविली." 

(Talwalkar went on to make fun of Facebook and Internet in his unique style,  observing that, in today's times,  every one feels that the world has no hope of survival until they read one's thoughts.)

I don't know about today's Internet users and newspaper editors but I always thought that is what he himself felt- "the world has no hope of survival until they read my thoughts" (आपले विचार इतरांनी वाचल्याशिवाय जगाला तरणोपायच नाही)-  when he wrote those 'fiery' leaders for Maharashtra Times.

Later in the report, the following is attributed to Mr. Talwalkar:

 "एका युगाचा अंत होतो, परंतु दुसऱ्या युगाचा जन्म अद्याप झाल्याचे जाणवत नाही. म्हणून अशा मधल्या अधांतरी काळातच आमच्या पिढीची येरझार सुरू झाली..."

("An age ends but one doesn't feel that the next age has begun and our generation started pacing such a hanging period between (the ages)...")

This is complete baloney. Life just goes on. The past and the future are fundamentally no different than the present. They just are strange.  Civilisations, regimes come and go and some are better than others. History is cyclical not progressive. As John Crowley says: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."

As images fade, shadows lengthen, and the threat of being swallowed by the night looms, for an Ozymandias,  shedding tears is more honorable option than talking about the present he can't comprehend.

 Artist: Saul Steinberg, The New Yorker, 26 April 1958